a true English love-story, and a real sorrow. To his maturer years are ascribed the Troilus and Creseide, the Canterbury Tales, the House of Fame, and the Legend of Good Women. In many of these, the subject, form, or metres, have been distinctly acquired in the course of foreign travel or foreign reading. The stories of Troilus and Creseide and the Knight's Tale, and the entire plan of the Canterbury Tales, were taken from Boccaccio; the story told by the Nuns' priest, of the poor widow and her cock " Chaunticlere," is borrowed from a fable of Marie, a French poetess, and occurs originally in an old French metrical romance called Roman de Renart; and the Franklin relates the story of the faithful Dorigen in her castle among the black rocks of Bretagne, which he had heard in a lay of the "olde gentil Bretons." The Wife of Bath is indignant with Jankin for poring over books of invective against women and marriage, such as abounded in Chaucer's age. Her story, which follows the voluble account of her married life, occurs also in Gower's Confessio Amantis, and is found in the Gesta Romanorum, a collection of mediaval fables and anecdotes. Indeed, the poems of Chaucer represent their author as a man of wide and varied reading of that kind, romantic, gay, and curious, which was most serviceable to his genius, and which was only to be met with in the literatures of foreign countries. The work upon which his fame chiefly rests is the Canterbury Tales. They occupied, doubtless, a considerable portion of his life; but Mr. Furnivall places the central period of their production in 1386. This was the year in which Chaucer, aged "forty years and upwards,” sat in Parliament at Westminster, from October 1st to November 1st, as one of the Knights of the Shire for Kent. At this date the old king had been dead for nine years, and Richard and the country were still ruled by Edward's sons. The peasantry had failed in 1381 to obtain from the youthful king or the Parliament enfranchisement from serfdom. Religious reform had been checked by the death of Wycliffe in 1384. But the English Bible, which Wycliffe had bequeathed to the English nation, was doing its work, in spite of all obstructions, in favour of both social and intellectual freedom. This may be regarded as the date at which Chaucer had reached the summit of his worldly fortunes. Until then he had enjoyed what was probably regarded at that period as a large yearly income, derived from a variety of sources, pensions and annuities to himself and his wife from the king and John of Gaunt; wages received from time to time for state services; and salary paid to him as Comptroller of Customs, etc., in the port of London. After 1386, these 'means of livelihood being curtailed, Chaucer fell by degrees into extreme poverty, and it was not until Henry IV.'s accession in 1399 that his pensions were renewed. This was only one year before his death. The Canterbury Tales were at that date still in progress, and a number of tales, and the Epilogue, remained unwritten when Chaucer died at Westminster in 1400. Chaucer wrote in almost all the metres till then in use, and did great service to our later literature by educating the national ear to the enjoyment of a finer and more varied rhythmic music than it had yet heard. The eight-syllabled rhyming measure was common to many French romances. It was employed by Chaucer in the Romaunt of the Rose, the Death of Blanche the Duchess, and the House of Fame, by Barbour in the Bruce, and by Gower in the Confessio Amantis. Chaucer's other measures consist, with a few unimportant exceptions, of ten-syllabled lines, arranged either in rhymed couplets, as in the Prologue of the Canterbury Tales, and in many of the tales themselves, or in the stanza known as "Rhyme-royal," or Chaucer's stanza," used in Troilus and Creseide. FROM THE DEATH OF BLANCHE THE DUCHESS. THE DREAM-CHAMBER. Me thought thus that it was May, And in the dawning there I lay. 1 Dreamt. 2 Startled. Through noise and sweetness of their song. Was nowhere heard yet half so sweet For there was none of them that feigned And, sooth to sayn,6 my chamber was My windows weren shut each one, 1 Each one sang. 2 Old form of its. 5 Except. 6 To speak the truth. 4 Sound. 3 Joyful. 7 Broken. 8 Both with text and gloss (referring to the old glossed MSS.) And eke the welkin was so fair; 1 Temperate. 3 Ne wot. THE DREAM. And as I lay thus, wonder loud How they would slee the hart with strength, I never stent Till I come to the field without. "Say, fellow, who shall huntè here?" A God's half, in good time,” quoth I; "Go we fast!" and gan to ride. When we came to the forest side, Every man did right anon As10 to hunting fell to done. The maister hunt, anon, foot hotell With a great horn blew three mote12 6 Fresh horses. 9 With God's favour. At the uncoupling of his houndis. I was go walked fro my tree; Held down his head and joined his ears As though the earth envyè wold9 To be gayer than the heaven, To have mo flowers suchè seven10 It had forgot the poverty That winter through his coldè morrows 1 Terms used in hunting. 6 Many. 2 Fallen on a false scent. 4 As if it had known me. 7 The flowery green. 8 To look on. 3 A hunting term signifying that the game is far off. 5 Quickly. 9 Would aspire. 10 Seven times more flowers than there are stars in the welkin. 12 Grow. 11 Its. |